Greta Gerwig Takes Risks
Life as an
aspiring something in New York in your twenties is often a walk on the edge of
despair. Noah Baumbach has directed a movie that captures the stone cold
aloneness of young adults in that period after they have left the college cocoon
and before they have found jobs or partners. There is a particular cruelty in
that kind of New York coldness.
The problem
for Frances (Greta Gerwig) is that she is not a newly minted college graduate in
temporary misery. She is twenty-seven, still earning little as an apprentice
dancer, and it’s all about to get even worse. She shares an apartment with her
best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) who announces unexpectedly that she is moving
to the apartment of her boyfriend Patch (Patrick Heusinger). Frances loses her
only anchors: her roommate and the apartment they share.
How does she
deal with it? For starters, Frances is a physical and verbal klutz. She runs
joyfully through the streets of New York, but she will trip; she dances with a
smile, but will miss a beat; and she can stop a conversation dead with
non-sequiturs. She mooches beds here or there, falls in with young men who are
writing scripts, sculpting, or fashioning jokes they hope Saturday Night Live
might like.
She tries to
sustain herself by dipping into her own well of natural joy but whether she
spends an ill-conceived weekend in Paris on a credit card that came in the mail
or soaks up the lights of New York at night, she is still passing temporarily
through the lives of people who are just as dislocated as she is. This scattered
age group navigates breakups with hurt feelings and spends long hours doing the
laundry and running errands.
Nothing comes
close to being a home because the roommates and addresses will change shortly,
probably in a burst of sadness. After a Christmas visit to her West Coast
parents, (played by Gerwig’s own parents), Frances returns to New York still
running on empty.
“Frances Ha”
is billed as a comedy, and you will manage to laugh at the awkward awfulness of
the lives of these young people, knowing that sooner or later they will probably
find a path to friends and jobs as a foundation for their lives. The good news
is that a sharp script by Baumbach and Gerwig has caught the searing
loneliness of starting out in the country’s most formidable city.
Gerwig,
always unafraid of looking silly, takes her usual risks in playing Frances as a
wonderful stew of great ingredients that haven’t even begun to blend at 27. Her
Frances, we know, will one day give and take and actually fit in the
inhospitable landscape that surrounds her. Characteristically unpredictable,
Baumbach and Gerwig opt for a small, symbolic final twist that tells us their
characters will have to work things out for themselves, that their creators
aren’t about to do it for them.
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